May 3, 2021

Why Outbound Is Here to Stay (and How to Do It Better)

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Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.

Episode Highlights

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We regret to inform you that even the greatest content plan won’t get top talent breaking down your door. (At least, not on every search). All the employer branding in the world won’t change the fact that your recruiters still have to get it done. Much like Jordan & Pippen or J.D. & Turk, they work best when they work together.

Nate Guggia and James Hornick dig into the relationship between content and outbound in the Employer Content Show, Episode 15: ”Why Outbound Is Here to Stay (and How to Do It Better)”

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.

Episode Transcript

Everybody. Welcome to the employer. Content show part of the talent insights series brought to you by Hirewell, and before you apply, I’m your host, James Hornick joining me is my co-host from before you apply.

Soon to be nominated for LinkedIn’s top voices, 2021.

Hey buddy. Yeah. I don’t even know if that’s still a thing if they still do that or not. I was just thinking about the other day though. How do you get on that list? Oh man. It’s such PR I know. Oh yeah. Yeah, it is. It’s gotta be. Yeah. All right. So today, take a second. Let’s get into it. Why outbound is here to stay and how to do it better.

Cool. So I can, I can, I can set this up perhaps. I really didn’t plan for this one as well as I would’ve liked to, but the need for outbound. So a challenge that we always see in, in recruiting and a lot of time, this is with companies that just start growing maybe the first time, or maybe they’re, they’re new to.

Explosive growth phases. Maybe they’ve been around for a little while, done a lot of referral hiring. A lot of companies, a lot of people, a lot of maybe hiring managers, a lot of owners of companies. They don’t understand how hard hiring could be. And until they learn until they figured out the hard way, and there’s always a lot of people have a misconception until they realize that it doesn’t work this way, that if you just post some jobs, you know what I mean?

That you’re gonna get your handsome inbound traffic or make your hires. And like things like in my world as a recruiter, That’s like the most absurd thing in the world. Cause we only work mean most people hire us for situations where like, yeah, it’s really hard. Like we can’t get it done. Right. But you know, I know there, there there’s a spectrum, right?

So there are, there are certain jobs where you can get a lot of inbound traffic from your position. There’s certain jobs where you have to head hunt. Like there’s no other way, it’s getting it done. And we talk about content, right? We talk about content a lot and it’s extremely valuable. It does make hiring easier, but it absolutely does not make.

Outbound efforts to, to acquire talent and whatnot and proactive recruiting. It does not make that obsolete by any stretch. It makes it easier, which is what we’re going to talk about. But it does not make the need go away and we haven’t really, I mean, technically outbound, still content. Right? So the messaging and stuff that you do, I think it’s important that we kind of talk about that a little bit, because that’s really kind of what a lot of this kind of comes down to.

So, I’ve also talked about this a lot and some of the other kinds of content I’ve done about why I think the contingent models is really stupid because that kind of dovetails into this cause one point in time, let’s go back 20 years, like sets were a lot more simple. There were less types of development languages.

They were less types of marketing. There were less types of HR functions and, you know You can have a pool of candidates who might fit certain jobs and you just have to like make relationships and you’ll be able to with people in a certain skillset, but everything’s so specific nowadays, like there’s, I don’t know, a hundred different types of JavaScript that you could make part of like your requirement, you know?

So like, Literally everything that recruiters do in tech digital, lot of other kind of like office type jobs is, is head hunting. I had to actually look up the different seed, head hunting and recruiting of the day. I didn’t know. Yeah. Tell me I won’t. It started because I wasn’t sure if head hunting was like supposed to be an offensive term or knocks.

I heard people say like, well, am I allowed to say that? Like, is that like an insult? They head Hunter and I saw someone else say like, was talking about how we need to get rid of that term. I’m like, Am I supposed to be upset by that. But according to some website, the difference is recruiting is everything.

It’s just the process of whether it’s inbound people, whether it’s onboarding people, it’s like the full soup to nuts process of hiring. Whoever’s facilitating that. So inbound, outbound the process behind it. Whereas head hunting specifically refers to usually more executive levels, but anything specific proactively targeting people, working jobs, who weren’t looking.

That process that’s head hunting. Really. So basically everything that like every recruiter, you know, does is head hunting anybody in a third party, like that’s, we are head hunters, you know, and that’s, but that’s also the reason why I think it’s like from a definition standpoint is that A lot of companies hire recruiters that can do general stuff, but they need to overlay that with some level of head hunting and that’s a completely different skillset.

And it’s also really hard. And I know that your client base is very kind of tech heavy, where it is the hardest. And that’s where we play a lot too, obviously. Yeah. So, and I think that’s kind of where I want to take the discussion in terms of Personalization and messages. And actually that’s kind of another point I want to hit on because I was like making fun of that today, but what actually works, what really works versus what people dislike to think works and what are methods that can make things easier.

adding content, adding better messaging and integrating content with messenger. Yeah.  , I kind of want to go off like riff off of your post today a little bit. There’s like personalization, like where is, what is the right level of personalization and how much does it matter? Yeah. It’s like, okay.

So the post I made today, that’s a great one, by the way, if you’re listening, go find it. It’s, it’s personalization is overrated and I came to the conclusion because I just did some basic research. I just, when I say basic, I mean, real basic, I asked. Here was my methodology. This was yesterday. I want to just prepare for this conversation cause I’m actually interested.

We hire senior staff. And we hire people who are experienced and we have a lot of high performers that like, no matter what their method is without knowing what it is, they know what they’re doing, results speak for themselves. Right. But we’re not the kind of place there, there are some firms that like, they want everyone doing everything the same way.

Whereas like we’re, we’re hiring experienced people that know how to do it. I also don’t think that if I told a group of people, Hey, do everything one way, like, maybe I’m wrong. You know what I mean? There’s always different ways of kind of doing messaging. So like let people experiment and try different things out.

So I basically said, all right, that 12 people that know kick ass, great numbers consistent like top producers. I just want to say guys, what do you do? Like, what’s your actual messaging? I haven’t like looked a lot of people’s messaging a long time and I asked him if maybe there was two questions, one was like what’s your first outreach?

Is it LinkedIn? Is it email? Is it calls? Is it text? What’s like your go-to and then just like, shoot me. What’s your, what’s the last message you sent out, you know? Okay. And I just want to look at them now.  I was also talking, so we’ve actually, we do. And then I find out we actually track these metrics really tightly.

Our head of sourcing had like spreadsheet broken down by month. And everyone’s kind of like from LinkedIn, their response rates and whatnot. So we actually have really good metrics on that, but here’s what I found out. Here’s what I learned. for our group, LinkedIn was the most common first outreach.

Doesn’t really seem to matter though. A lot of people, some people did like email better. Like I don’t think that I don’t think the medium you use really matters all that much. some people did calls, but like LinkedIn still seem to be the most popular, but getting out of the messages, it was all over the place.

Like the level of detail, the lack of detail or added or extra excessive amounts of detail vary greatly across the organization. And like I said, every single person, I asked this to do this. These are all people who are successful in what they’re doing. So a lot of things work, there’s not just one way to do it right now.

There was all, there was a lot of variation group to group. So like we recruit in tech, HR, digital finance, and accounting sales, and inherently there’s different response rates to those different areas. So like HR people probably respond to most tech and maybe finance and accounting respond the least. So,  you have to also, that was also another thing that kind of skewed me having any really good numbers, because I would have to like figure out kind of by division, right?

All those types of things, which make it a hostile, but here’s what everyone did, except for one person I’ll get back to this. Cause this is hysterical. Everybody always include company, name, , description of the company and the title of the job every single time. Very basic, extremely basic, but like.

Company named soft pitch. Here’s what the job is. Most people expanded on the job scope. So most people are like really got little more granular on it, but not all. And then some of the time, but not all the time. Some people will like who the hiring manager was mention of like what the ideal candidate looks like.

The one I really liked adding external links. That’s the thing is not everyone has that. Right? So some of our clients have really good employer brand sites, which another thing I want to talk about, which we can add to that. so here’s what I found was really funny. Three top people. I said at the start of this, I said, everyone included company name, company, description, title, almost everybody.

There was, there was one person who included absolutely none of that and just said, Hey, we’d love to network. Let’s connect. Everyone’s like, well, that’s the lamest message ever. That was the highest response rate. Do you wanna know why? Why HR? Oh, here’s what’s hysterical. And this is like maybe a side tangent rant.

If you’re a recruiter out there, you’re well aware that like HR people and TA people get really bent out of shape. When you message they’re heads of tech, they’re heads of digital, you know, whatever I get back to them, they get mad, right? they, you get to talking to whatever at the same time they are far and away, the most likely group of people to just want to connect, to chat about jobs for themselves.

No, not even close, not, I mean, it’s just by a, by a landslide and that’s, I’m not, and I’m not saying critical. It’s just like, this is how the world works. You know, it’s just kind of funny how that works out. Like I’ve had, I mean, I can say this over my career, like plenty of times where, like, you know, someone shoots me down, like gives me a scolding.

I’m like, how about we talk about you for a change and like, same conversation, you know what glad you asked. So anyways, just a little cruder comedy. Here’s this here’s the thing. So the top three, the second. So the second and third place person, and these are all really close, right? These are all extremely high response rates.

These are people who had extremely detailed everything about the job at the company about the pitch about th the ideal candidate had external details if available. So having all that stuff, yes, it did have a benefit and an impact. But it just, it depends what you’re recruiting for is what it comes down to.

You know, like the level of, of granularity you need to get is going to vary very, very dramatically, depending on what you’re recruiting for. Oh man. Okay. Okay. Oh gosh, I’m thinking about a bunch of stuff right now. one, I like the fact that you just kind of just allow. Your team to do their thing.

It’s like, do you, and then we’ll see what works kind of thing, because you’re right. I mean, there is this idea while there’s a lot of ideas about what is, what’s the right way to do it. What works best? go ahead. Good. I don’t want to cut you off. I’ve been talking too much, right? No, no, it’s fine.

 But the reality is, is like, who really knows. And, and like, and is there enough of this like experimentation or freedom to do a variety of different things at this level to figure out like what the hell even matters? Because like the idea of recording a highly personalized video, for example, which could potentially take a whole lot of time just to do one, especially if you’re talking about like, I’ve tried to do those before, like in the past.

And like, I don’t know how many times I like it. Rerecorded the thing and like felt nervous and all this kind of stuff with like, maybe I could have just sent like a simple email that would have taken me a couple minutes to write this is skipping down to something I was going to talk about later, but yeah, things that are overrated.

Yeah. Cause this dovetails perfectly into it. And this is, this is every LinkedIn sales influencer post ever on how to do your outbound. there’s just so many opinions on unnecessary stuff out there. And so everyone has their method, which they’re so close to. They insist is the way to do it such as like using video, like completely unnecessary.

Not a single person that in this group of superstars uses friggin videos in there. They use videos on online, like on LinkedIn, but in their messaging, no one uses it. You don’t need to, some people swear by voice notes. You know what I mean? No one, you don’t need to use voice notes. Like there’s all kinds of things on things you have to include things you don’t have to include.

I just don’t buy into any of it. I think that all you have to be able to do is articulate the value of the thing you’re talking about, how that would relate to somebody . You know, it’s as simple as, I mean, there’s, it’s, we could get more granular on how to do that, what things to include, but it’s just, it’s a lot of catching the right people at the right time and just articulating now the thing I guess I should mention is, you know, I did mention everyone said used company name, company description of what they do, what the value is, just the initial outreach.

That wasn’t always the case, like way back in the day old school recruiting, like that was like a big no-no. Hm. So people were always terrified that you were like, if you told a candidate who you haven’t talked to yet, who you’re talking to, what the company is, they’re going to go behind your back and steal your client and whatnot.

Like that’s a very like knuckle dragging dinosaur mentality. But, but that’s the whole thing is at the end of the day, People, if they’re interested in looking at stuff, they just want to know who the company is. Are they doing cool stuff or not? And what’s the job site. If they want to have a first conversation or not.

Right. That’s the thing.  Cool. All right.  I want to tell you, like, I’ve changed my tune on this one too. Like I I’ve, I’ve found myself doing this a lot lately where like I had these like really strong opinions and now they’ve like completely evolved in. Some of them are like total one eighties.

This is one of them where, you know, at first I was like brand brand, brand, brand, brand, brand. Like inbound, like you got to create this like inbound recruiting engine. Right? What was it? It was new to you. You’re excited. Yeah. You’re right. That’s exactly why. So then, and then I talked, I spend most of my time talking to recruiters and talent leaders at VC backed tech companies, mostly, right?

Like Pete people, like pure hiring engineers and  really skilled salespeople for the most part.  You know, and then you just like ask over and over and over again, like, how do you go about recruiting these people? Like, where are they coming in? What’s the percentage of like passive versus active.

And I know those are those terms. Let’s not get caught up in those, but but I think, you know what I mean? and you just like find out that like outbound is their number one method for reaching candidates. And it’s like how they’re able to filter their quality. And then you start to realize that like, okay, Why aren’t they investing more into that? Which is like now getting me back to like where some of the things like I’ve changed my tune on, like, I I’ve looked, I’ve started to look at like inbound calls, quote on quote inbound platforms, platforms where like companies, especially like startups will go and they’ll create like company pages or culture pages or whatever, to showcase themselves to like enlarge candidate, audience.

Yeah. With the hopes of like getting inbound and. I also have been hearing a lot that like those platforms just don’t produce the level of inbound equality that the company needs in order to fulfill the wrecks. How could they, it’s not like candidates were hanging out on this site. That’s the thing.

They’re not, not like no one, like. W, you know, when I spend my, my mess around time, when I’m, I don’t feel like working and I’ve got my phone, like I’m on Twitter, Instagram, right. Or I’m checking my options, trading account, you know, like I don’t, like, I’m not hanging out on some randos. I don’t want to start naming names here, but everyone knows what they are.

I’m not, I’m not hanging out in the glass door is not hanging out in the built in. Chicago’s like who hangs out nobody. Yeah. No, that’s the thing. And like these candidates, they do have jobs. The ones that we’re talking about right now, like they do have jobs. They’re well employed. I mean, the great thing though, is that they do have so many opportunities available to them that they always kind of have one foot in one foot out.

So it means that like, it’s really more just, just about like aligning timing and like checking some initial boxes to start a conversation. so I look at like the inbound platforms that a lot of startups spend money on and I just like, I really think they’re a waste of time because they don’t, they don’t help.

The number one motion, which is outbound, especially outbound to passive candidates. and so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about like, what is this like where, where does the, the attention needs to be directed? And I think it’s like make the thing that you do most often better. And in the meantime, still do the brand marketing and the awareness piece, but less of it put, put your attention on making the outbound better.

Supplement it with some like brand marketing. And then over time, those ratios will start to like adjust each other. But like I posted yesterday about this like 80, 20 split, where it’s like spend 80% of your time on making outbound veteran, 20% of your time, marketing your employer, brand your culture, your people, your the way you do things, whatever it might be.

And then slowly over time, those will start to adjust. But until you make the thing that you do day in and day out better, you’re just not going to get the results that you want, but we can talk about how to make it better. Yeah. So I I actually thought of a whole new area take this conversation, as you’re saying this, right?

As of two minutes ago, as you were talking, I realized there’s two, there’s two important aspects of employer brand that you have to fit everything into one bucket or the other one is top of funnel awareness. Meaning when you message somebody they’re more likely to get back to you because they’ve actually heard of your company before.

And how do you build that? How do you build your name and people just being aware of who your company is? Right. So a lot of it is like, like I said before, like finding where people actually hang out, you know what I mean? Yeah. Social media channels, things like that. So like, there’s actually some awareness of that.

Then the second thing is embedded meso. I I’m going to maintain that. Like in terms of the actual message itself, you don’t have to say a whole lot. You know what I mean? You have to get the top of the company description, the job description, but having a link to a place where they can actually hear from real people at the company talking about what they’re doing.

So if they do want to dig deeper and find out more information, more granular, maybe on something like before you apply, like are set where you’re going, but, but any employer brand site, right? Like all the, all those questions that people want asked one answered. Making sure. That’s your second. So there’s the first is like, okay.

Catch their attention. Because like they’ve heard of your company before, and then second is within the messaging, have some sort of external link or feature or something that goes somewhere where they can actually learn more than cause. Like, no matter what your email is gonna be an email, right. It’s just gonna be like, it’s a few lines of texts that you can’t really.

So you need to give them a place. It’s a little more rich media where they can truly learn what the hell you. Yeah, I think it’s like, I think about it. If we’re because the goal is to start a conversation. And if it’s like I saw, I saw an engineer post, Daniel, James, Daniel, James. He put, he posted just recently about like a couple things that if a recruiter just did these things, they would just start conversations with, with engineers.

And, and so I stole it. And so it’s like, it’s content, but it’s also information. And I think like when companies think of, content and we’ll just call it employer, branding content, they think of this high level culture stuff, whatever. They don’t think of it in terms of like relaying information that is relevant, that allows people to check boxes.

Because if you don’t check those boxes, then none of the other stuff is going to happen. You can provide all of the other stuff after the fact, but like start with. Content that checks the boxes, you know? And he said like a good job description, transparent compensation, showing like how you work, how you do things, tech stack and tools.

Like it just like simple stuff. But if you don’t do that, I feel like the rest of the stuff doesn’t matter because you’re not even going to have the opportunity to talk about the other stuff. there’s probably 10 things that everybody wants to know before. They’re going to like jump in and if you can just provide access to all those 10 things, that’s it.

That’s why, like, I I’ve harped on this candidate FAQ so many times, but if there was just like a candidate FAQ, which is like a living doc that you can just update periodically and you link to that damn thing in your messages, and it’s like, here’s the answers to all the things we know you care about before you apply.

Yeah. Boom, you go right there and it’s just like, okay, I can look at that. It’s going to take me like a minute. I can like filter, like whether this is like fit now or not, it’s free if it’s worth my time or not. And I can like opt myself in or out, you know? And it’s like, it’s that easy. But I think Daniel was talking about in that, in that post, somebody sent him a link and a message.

He clicked on it. It was going to, it was like a 25 question something or other. And he’s just like, are you kidding me? Like, yeah, that’s not going to do it. I wanted to talk about, so the, the thing that I was talking about today, the personalization, or how stupid and overrated it is, that was also another thing.

Kind of like my, my very informal internal surveys that like, I don’t, I was relating it back to like the tech tools, but that really wasn’t the point. Like I remember when I demoed some tool where it would like. Look at someone’s LinkedIn profile and pull out where they went to school and try to suggest, make some sort of like con like no one cares about this crap.

You know, it’s like the connect and pitch. Like always, I see, we know the same people and saw you went to so-and-so school. How did you like, you know, this is not, it’s not personalization. Right. And I just think it really still comes down to value, you know, people perceptions on this scale of skewed, because if you asked somebody Alaska, a lot of people, what will they, what will make them get back to recruit her in a lot of times be, well, I can sh if I can see, they really wanted to get to know me.

And they really looked at my background and could articulate certain things, but in a real world, no one, no one really cares about that because if you’re looking for a job and you see a cool pitch, you’re going to get back. Or if you’re not looking for a job and someone does all the things you just said, what make you get back?

You’re still not going to get back. Yeah. You know, like how many it’s like we were talking before developers are just pounded with messages nowadays.  If you’re a dev and you’re getting 10 recruiters contacting you every single day, like they’re just, they don’t have the time to get back.

It doesn’t matter how great your pitch is. If they’re not looking that is what it is at that point. Right? Yeah. I mean, this is like, I want to go back to something that you said about the brand awareness that helps enable the outbound. That’s a really important point. and I was thinking, I might’ve mentioned that.

I know I mentioned this to you. I don’t know if we did it on show or not, but like, you know, huge tech company that I was talking to, I was talking to one of their, engineering recruiters who said, like she gets a 10 out of 10 response, like. You know, like, there’s this, like also this, we’ll call it like this idea, this myth that like engineers don’t pay attention to LinkedIn.

I don’t think that’s true. I think they just don’t like to say that they pay attention to it, but she said like she can send 10, 10 InMails and get 10 responses because of the brand. Every engineer wants to work for them. A hundred percent. That’s like that’s top of there’s. Even those examples where I mentioned there are certain companies like you can, you can always throw on Amazon.

Right. But like thinking in Chicago, what cameo just got like, they’re like a billion dollar company now. And it had some big press, but like, everyone who works there has good things to say, like they have such good pub, you know what I mean? Like I have to imagine they have an easier time getting responses from devs when they reach out than Joe blow company nobody’s ever heard.

Yeah. And so like, you know, going back to this like 80, 20 thing that I mentioned, like, if you have to commit to that 20% is the only way it’s going to grow. It’s only, it’s the only way that like you’re because okay. I’m going to be all over the place, but just bear with, right. Yeah, I really think that, when companies, especially early mid stage tech companies, when they say they want to do employer branding, what they really are saying is they just want to recruit and hire easier.

It’s like employer branding is code word for that. And what they’re actually looking for is recruiter. Enablement. Not employer branding. They just like D they’re just don’t know the terminology. And I just made up recruiter enablement anyway, but like, it’s, that’s it, they just like want their recruiters to have an easier job, finding people, starting conversations and hiring people.

And so if you commit to that 20%. And you realize that it’s just like this long-term ongoing play and that you’re going to consistently do things to get your name out there and just show up in the places that your candidates spend their time. Yeah. Like over time it will just, you will become a recognizable name and, just be known as like, Oh, like somebody who just shows up until the point where like when your recruiter and that, and that candidate meet up.

With that brand is like, Oh, okay. Like, Oh, I know them, but they, but you got to commit to that 20%. You can’t have acid and you have to realize that, like, it’s not going to happen today. It’s not going to happen next month. It’s probably not going to happen in six months. But like, you know, and you can, yeah.

Another thing too is like, if I think about like brand marketing and like distribution, I really do think that recruiters are like a wonderful channel to distribute this information and content. I mean, if you’re, reaching out multiple times, . You know, that’s giving you brand recognition too.

Even if somebody doesn’t respond, I mean, they’re getting there, they’re seeing your name and if you’re providing them with the right information, then that’s going to stick at some way. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I’m trying to think it was anything else, like, from a, like a execution perspective that I really wanted to hit on.

I can’t, I can’t emphasize enough that like right place, right. Time is so much of it. And as much as like people, you, you want to, everyone wants to talk about the personalization game and you know, but it’s, it’s, it still comes down to numbers on some level. I think so too. Yeah, it does. You can’t predict, you can’t predict when someone’s, when it’s going to be that day that someone’s going to be open to saying yes.

You know, someone’s boss took a crap on them and they’re like F it, like, I’m ready to go. Like, if we knew what day that was going to be, no one would be getting bombarded with messages. We just wait for that day, but it doesn’t exist. Oh, I’m curious, what are your thoughts about, about copywriting?

In the recruiting space. It’s talked about all the time in like outbound sales. Copywriting is like a very in, especially in marketing too, you know, it’s like, it’s, well-known like some companies like, like they pay good money to have it. But in the recruiting space, it’s not talked about that much. What do you think?

we should, we should get our boy Mr. Sullivan to come talk about it sometime. It’s the entirety of his business. I think I’ll put it this way. So I’m going to give Mitch’s it’s so there’s no one who, if you’re out there listening and you don’t know who Mitch Sullivan is, you should definitely follow him.

he’s a gentleman in the UK. He’s hysterically funny. people always ask me all about the number of number three ranked sarcastic comment on LinkedIn. So who’s number one and two. Definitely. Ms. Sullivan. Probably Mike when it will be another one. Right. So but Mitch’s entire game at the keys.

He was in recruiting a long time, but he does copywriting for recruiters as well. I think he calls his business, but he it’s actual job ads and, his point that he loves hammering until people probably get sick of it is that job ads are not the same as job descriptions. And if you think they are, that’s why you’re not getting any responses.

Yeah. Like the purpose of a job ad is to just excite intrigue and motivate someone to actually respond, not to list out the boring responsibilities of the jobs. These things look very, very differently. So look open-ended if you have a newspaper. Well, one newspaper look at what an ad looks like or a magazine.

That’s what a job ad is supposed to look like. Something intriguing and interesting and fun and whatever. Right. And then talk about the job too, obviously. But, so yes, I’ve always thought copywriting is extremely important. I think it’s way more important than people realize for any public facing, whether it’s a job ad or their website or anything else, like how to write in a way that’s.

Human and intriguing, funny versus boring corporate speak, which I think is wherever it gets hung up emails. I mean, it’s important, but I think it’s, I do think that people overthink how playful and clever they need to be in their sales messaging and emails. Like you should be able to articulate who you’re recruiting for.

What’s cool about them and what the job is pretty succinctly. Without having to like, so yes, you need some copywriting skills, but I don’t think it needs to be like some zany over the top. Like I think when it comes to like direct outbound, people just want to know the facts. Mm that’s it. Okay. Good point.

They just want to know the facts. yeah. I just think about it, like from a buyer’s perspective too. Like if you’re buying, if you’re buying something, if you’re in the market for something like, what information do you want? To like justify you having an actual call with a salesperson. Same in recruiting.

It’s like, what information do you need? Just give me that. Give me that information. That’s it? I mean, small part of my job is just to evaluate new tech. So like I’ll do one to two calls a week, maybe with the sales reps from different firms, different, whether it’s like recruitment, tech, marketing, tech, sales, tech, whatever.

And it’s just, it just comes out of like, if it catches my eye and looks cool. Simple as that, like, if there’s something in it that I can see from the message, like, wow, there’s some value there that I haven’t thought of before. That’s why I’m taking calls with, you know, so a lot of the messages I get, I’m sure they’re well articulated, but it’s like boring stuff.

Like I get it right away. It’s not, or it’s stuff. This is not useful to us. Like, I can tell what it is, but you know, stuff that’s intriguing and new that I think that’s something that we would be able to use or that’s something I need to learn more about. Probably that’s the answer. Something I feel like I need to learn more about, is the stuff I decided to get back on.

Yeah, I’m really curious. I’ve thrown this question out a little bit here and there, but like, I want to know if any recruiters are using sales, like sales style decks in their outbound. Like, I don’t know. I don’t even know if it matters, but like I got the only reason I got the whole deck or like an attachment or did he mean like a, like a deck, like you clicked?

Okay. So the reason I ask is because I had somebody send me. And it was I rarely respond to cold outbound emails, but I do. It’s not that I don’t, it’s just like, it comes down to timing for sure. Just like anything, you know, but I got one last week and it was like, the guy hit on it was perfect timing.

It was something I was really thinking about. it was very, very relevant to something that I do, which is my newsletter. Any included a deck. And so like I clicked on the deck and I was able to like scroll through the deck like quickly and just get like the gist of what was going on. And I was like, Oh, this is cool.

So you’d like, check those three boxes for me. And I was like, Oh, this is definitely worth it. Cool. Like, I’m worth, I want to explore this. And I’m wondering if like anybody in recruiting is doing that. I would imagine probably not. maybe, I mean, I haven’t seen it. Like I said, it might be overkill. It might be overkill.

Like it’s just, it’s, that’s the thing is like recruiting. You also have to realize, like, we’re talking about a really broad field here. So like, when I’m talking about the people at my company, you know, we’re, we’re we sell, these are, you know, small to medium sized tech firms. These are enterprise front. I mean, they are office jobs.

 But recruiting as a field is extremely broad. You could be recruiting truck drivers and welders, and you know, it’s a completely different games. So like we’re not working you and I really aren’t talking to all audiences, you know? So there might be, I, I would say this in terms of having a sales deck.

I would think that maybe the more specific and executive level and high level things are the more work you might need to do around that. So I guess, yes, we, cause we do executive search and, I don’t know if we’ve had had a sales deck, but that’s usually, well, no, take that back.

Yeah. Confidential searches later in the process is when you have to get more granular like that. So yeah, they, yeah, they all end with this and then I’ll stop talking. the great thing is, is If you design your content to be used with the number one use case of outbound, like you’re going to design out assets that fit the outbound model.

Like those can also be repurposed easily on other platforms for like the brand marketing piece. So it’s like, you’re, you’re accomplishing like two in one, but if you just designed them specifically for the number one use case, that’s the direction you need to go. I think, yeah. Okay. So I would say in summing this up, like, should we be adding to that point being more specific?

What I would do? I’m not an internal recruiter, but if I was, I would make sure I’m getting video content. Or audio content, either podcast or videos of the hiring managers for these jobs, talking about what they do, what they’re looking for, that way, whoever the, the candidate is can actually hear, Oh, here’s the person I’ll be reporting to and actually hear them talk through their thought process and what they’re looking at, what they’re doing and have that be an embedded and, a link out from your initial outreach, that way from the very get-go, you’re providing more information in a direct line of the thought process, the person doing the hiring in the very first message.

And then you can also use that as you said to advertise wherever people hang out, wherever people hear. Yes, exactly. All right. That’s all I got. Yeah. Okay, sweet. We’re done. That’s a wrap for the employer content show. If you want to hear more about what Nate and I have to say, you can subscribe to the higher world channel on YouTube, where we have a playlist of all of our episodes and the talent insights podcast, which is available on Apple, Google, Amazon, and Spotify.

Nate. Pleasure as always, all right, everyone out there, we will see you soon. .

 

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